MOVING TO FRONT FROM 2 DAYS AGO--LOTS OF INTERESTING CONTRIBUTIONS, MORE WELCOME Reader Kenneth Lakritz calls my attention to this item from Prospect Magazine in which various philosophers and authors choose their favorite living philosopher. (Of course, we settled the...

My friend Scott Shapiro summed it up on Twitter: "Last night proved that the Democrats can win anywhere provided they run against a child molester abandoned by his party and endorsed only by a sexually predatory president."

Elizabeth Fricker (epistemology), emerita at Oxford, will begin teaching each Spring at the University of Dame starting January 2018 for at least the next three years (with the possibility of renewal beyond that time). She will also be in residence...

Two years ago, I predicted that Bruyas fraudulent and confused criticisms of the PGR and the whole Bruyahaha spectacle (and here) would have no influence on the new PGR, and it didnt. Meanwhile, Metaphilosophy stands discredited by its handling of...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 8--REVISED AND UPDATED WITH THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS Legal scholar and theorist Alon Harel (Hebrew U, Jerusalem) writes: The Israeli academic community has so far been detached from the political disputes over the territories. This is...

Anyone in the New York City area, and especially on Long Island, in the 1970s who followed rock n roll knew the "Good Rats," the "worlds most famous unknown band," as they amusingly, and not inaccurately, billed themselves. Rock, blues,...

The main thing that strikes me in looking at the new U.S. overall "top 50" posted yesterday by Professor Pynes is how almost all the changes from the 2014 Report reflect actual changes in the interim. For example (and starting...

Professor Brogaard and I are in the process of cleaning and calculating the results of the PGR survey, the final results of which will be appear at a redesigned PGR site hosted, as before, by Wiley-Blackwell. Since application season is...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 3--UPDATED Im very sorry to report the untimely passing of Professor ONeill, a leading scholar of early modern philosophy at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, where she was Professor of Philosophy. Her husband Gary Ostertag,...

The House of Representatives actually passed a bill that would require civilized states to honor the licenses to carry concealed weapons issued by barbaric states even when the holder of the license is in the civilized state that prohibits concealed...

Paul C. Taylor (philosophy of race, aesthetics, pragmatism, social and political philosophy), currently Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has accepted a position as W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, beginning in...

This charming interview with Tim Scanlon (emeritus, Harvard) covers his trajectory into philosophy at Princeton as an undergraduate, his graduate work at Oxford (where he discovered Kants moral philosophy by accident) and then Harvard (where he wrote a dissertation on...

I accepted an invitation to be on the editorial board many months ago, before the editor-in-chief was named, which I learned of by e-mail this morning (the editorial board was not consulted): I am pleased to announce Prof. Graham Harman...

Once again into the fray. A brief excerpt from the paper: The main threats to academic freedom in the natural sciences in the capitalist democracies come from powerful business interests that disfavor, for profit-seeking reasons, certain discoveries: for example, concerning...

It doesnt measure implicit bias, and what it does measure doesnt correlate with discriminatory behavior. Its now well past the point where philosophers should be embarrassed to still be trafficking in this pseudo-science.

Weve had so much amusement with the reactionary religious fanatic Ed Feser over the years, that it was inevitable that several readers would send me this devastating review of his latest; some excerpts: This brings me to Feser and Bessette’s...

The 2014 campaign to take down the Philosophical Gourmet Report (hereafter "the Report") was, as Ive had occasion to note before, a fraud, but with a new Report about to appear, perhaps its worth recapping yet again what actually happened...

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 29, WITH MANY UPDATES AND NEW LINKS Dean Zimmerman at Rutgers has let me know of the passing of Professor Fodor, one of the great figures of Anglophone philosophy of the last half century. He...

A teenage Stevie Winwood got his start with this British blues band, most-remembered for that staple of classic rock radio, "Gimme Some Lovin" from 1966. This tune (co-written by Winwood) was the flip-side of another Spencer Davis Group hit single,...

Reader Prabhu Venkataraman, a mathematician at Eureka College, shared this apt observation by his colleague Zeke Jarvis on the reconciliation process for the tax bill: There are still some differences between the House and Senate tax bills that need to...

...which it may if this is accurate. Anti-Russian sentiment is virulent among many Republican Senators and Representatives, plus, as Ive said before, theyd all prefer Pence. UPDATE: A good explanation of why this development is so significant.

Of course its bad for human beings in general, except the wealthy, but this CHE piece outlines the harms to higher education. I suspect both the axing of the charitable deduction and the tax on large university endowments will be...

As Christopher Pynes announced last week, the time was extended for the survey until this Sunday. I think that was wise, since we had never before pulled off a two-week window for the PGR surveys (rather than three weeks), certainly...

Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: On Purpose by Michael Ruse (Princeton University Press, 2018). Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood by Ziyad Marar (Bloomsbury, 2018). The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Volume 2: A New...

This is a nicely done, "popular" essay on Philippa Foot and bits of 20th-century moral philosophy. It caricatures emotivism in the usual ways that have become fashionable, and because of its British focus, it says nothing at all about Charles...

..."the best-known philosopher in the English-speaking world." I assume what they meant was the "best-known philosopher in The Weekly Standard offices," where apparently no one has heard of Peter Singer, Jurgen Habermas (who is better-known than Scruton even in the...